Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(3,574)
- Faculty Publications (842)
- 2019
- Working Paper
On Her Own Account: How Strengthening Women's Financial Control Affects Labor Supply and Gender Norms
By: Natalia Rigol, Erica Field, Rohini Pande, Simone Schaner and Charity Troyer-Moore
Can greater control over earned income incentivize women to work and influence gender norms? In collaboration with Indian government partners, we provided rural women with individual bank accounts and randomly varied whether their wages from a public workfare program... View Details
- 2018
- Article
Prior Ties and the Limits of Peer Effects on Startup Team Performance
By: Sharique Hasan and Rembrand Koning
We conduct a field experiment at an entrepreneurship bootcamp to investigate whether interaction with proximate peers shapes a nascent startup team's performance. We find that teams whose members lack prior ties to others at the bootcamp experience peer effects that... View Details
- 2019
- Chapter
Problem, Person, and Pathway: A Framework for Social Innovators
By: Julie Battilana, Brittany Butler, Marissa Kimsey, Johanna Mair, Christopher Marquis and Christian Seelos
As the appetite for learning about social innovation intensifies, how can we better prepare practitioners for the work of addressing the world’s pressing social problems at the relevant scale? This chapter presents the “3P” framework that we developed to help address... View Details
- September 2019
- Article
The Self-Presentational Consequences of Upholding One's Stance in Spite of the Evidence
By: Leslie John, Martha Jeong, Francesca Gino and Laura Huang
Five studies explore the self-presentational consequences of refusing to “back down” – that is, upholding a stance despite evidence of its inaccuracy. Using data from an entrepreneurial pitch competition, Study 1 shows that entrepreneurs tend not to back down even... View Details
- August 2019 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Unifying Divisions: Joro's Mission to Preserve the Planet
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Marilyn Morgan Westner
The case focuses on the initial startup team and Founders’ agreements. In March 2018, Sanchali Pal proposed renegotiating the informal founders’ agreement and equity split she and her co-founders had drafted the previous spring. They had been working together for over... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Improving Regulatory Effectiveness Through Better Targeting: Evidence from OSHA
By: Matthew S. Johnson, David I. Levine and Michael W. Toffel
We study how a regulator can best target inspections. Our case study is a US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) program that randomly allocated some inspections. On average, each inspection averted 2.4 serious injuries (9%) over the next five years.... View Details
- Article
Effect of Different Financial Incentive Structures on Promoting Physical Activity Among Adults: A Randomized Clinical Trial
By: Chethan Bachireddy, Andrew Joung, Leslie K. John, Francesca Gino, Bradford Tuckfield, Luca Foschini and Katherine L. Milkman
Importance: Few adults engage in recommended levels of physical activity. Financial incentives can promote physical activity, but little is known about how their structure influences their effectiveness; for example, whether incentives are more effective if they are... View Details
- July 9, 2019
- Article
Common Knowledge, Coordination, and Strategic Mentalizing in Human Social Life
By: Julian De Freitas, Kyle A. Thomas, Peter DiScioli and Steven Pinker
People often coordinate for mutual gain, such as keeping to opposite sides of a stairway, dubbing an object or place with a name, or assembling en masse to protest a regime. Because successful coordination requires complementary choices, these opportunities raise the... View Details
- July 2019
- Article
The Gravitational Pull of Expressing Passion: When and How Expressing Passion Elicits Status Conferral and Support from Others
By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Christopher To, Shira Agasi, Stéphane Côté and Adam D. Galinsky
Prior research attributes the positive effects of passion on professional success to intrapersonal characteristics. We propose that interpersonal processes are also critical because observers confer status on and support those who express passion. These interpersonal... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Veil-of-Ignorance Reasoning Favors the Greater Good
By: Karen Huang, Joshua D. Greene and Max Bazerman
The “veil of ignorance” is a moral reasoning device designed to promote impartial decision-making by denying decision-makers access to potentially biasing information about who will benefit most or least from the available options. Veil-of-ignorance reasoning was... View Details
- June 2019
- Article
Brokers vs. Retail Investors: Conflicting Interests and Dominated Products
By: Mark Egan
I study how brokers distort household investment decisions. Using a novel convertible bond dataset, I find that consumers often purchase dominated bonds—cheap and expensive versions of otherwise identical bonds coexist in the market. The empirical evidence suggests... View Details
- 2010
- Article
Budgeting, Psychological Contracts, and Budgetary Misreporting
By: Susanna Gallani, Ranjani Krishnan, Eric J. Marinich and Michael D. Shields
This study examines the effect of psychological contract breach on budgetary misreporting. Psychological contracts are mental models or schemas that govern how employees understand their exchange relationships with their employers. Psychological contract breach leads... View Details
- 2010
- Article
I May Not Agree With You, but I Trust You: Caring About Social Issues Signals Integrity
By: Julian Zlatev
What characteristics of an individual signal trustworthiness to other people? I propose that individuals who care about contentious social issues signal to observers that they have integrity and thus can be trusted. Critically, this signal conveys trustworthiness... View Details
- June 2019
- Article
Learning From Mum: Cross-National Evidence Linking Maternal Employment and Adult Children’s Outcomes
By: Kathleen L. McGinn, Mayra Ruiz Castro and Elizabeth Long Lingo
Analyses relying on two international surveys from over 100,000 men and women across 29 countries explore the relationship between maternal employment and adult daughters’ and sons’ employment and domestic outcomes. In the employment sphere, adult daughters, but not... View Details
- Article
The Mixed Effects of Online Diversity Training
By: Edward H. Chang, Katherine L. Milkman, Dena M. Gromet, Robert W. Rebele, Cade Massey, Angela L. Duckworth and Adam M. Grant
We present results from a large (n = 3,016) field experiment at a global organization testing whether a brief science-based online diversity training can change attitudes and behaviors toward
women in the workplace. Our preregistered field experiment included an... View Details
- April 2019 (Revised January 2025)
- Case
Clear Link Technologies, LLC: Driving Sales with Peer Effects
By: Christopher Stanton, Richard Saouma and Olivia Hull
The importance of a good peer or coworker is widely discussed, but understanding the glue that makes coworkers valuable is less understood. This case sheds light on the importance of peers and the practices and environments that make a group greater than the sum of its... View Details
Keywords: Talent and Talent Management; Interactive Communication; Experience and Expertise; Decision Making; Training; Design; Compensation and Benefits; Knowledge Acquisition; Knowledge Sharing; Human Capital; Working Conditions; Measurement and Metrics; Outcome or Result; Performance; Performance Improvement; Research; Sales; Salesforce Management; Motivation and Incentives; Telecommunications Industry; Utah; United States
- April 2019
- Article
Incentives for Public Goods Inside Organizations: Field Experimental Evidence
By: Andrea Blasco, Olivia S. Jung, Karim R. Lakhani and Michael Menietti
Understanding why employees go the extra mile at work is a key problem for many organizations. We conduct a field experiment at a medical organization to study motivations for employees to submit project proposals for organizational improvement. In total, we analyze... View Details
- April 2019
- Article
Mitigating Malicious Envy: Why Successful Individuals Should Reveal Their Failures
People often feel malicious envy, a destructive interpersonal emotion, when they compare themselves to successful peers. Across three online experiments and a field experiment of entrepreneurs, we identify an interpersonal strategy that can mitigate feelings of... View Details
- April 2019
- Article
Rituals and Nuptials: The Emotional and Relational Consequences of Relationship Rituals
By: Ximena Garcia-Rada, Ovul Sezer and Michael I. Norton
Four studies reveal the benefits of relationship rituals: couples with relationship rituals report more positive emotions and greater relationship satisfaction and commitment than those without them. We show that rituals are crucial for understanding consumption... View Details
Keywords: Rituals; Relationship Satisfaction; Relationships; Satisfaction; Spending; Behavior; Perception; Emotions
- March 2019 (Revised April 2019)
- Case
Measuring Impact at JUST Capital
By: Ethan C. Rouen and Charles C.Y. Wang
JUST Capital is a nonprofit organization that seeks to make public companies more "just" by measuring and ranking their overall impact on society, based on the priorities most important to the average American. This case examines JUST’s strategy for influencing... View Details